They have their place - a well designed educational game is much more efficient than a normal teacher, but the time spent on these machines seriously needs to be limited. It would help if children were able to grow up in a decent environment where there's an outside worth spending time in instead, but we appear to be determined to make that impossible for most children.

They can sharpen up your aggression, and indeed are used in military training. A good simulator is a safe learning aid for driving, flying, surgery, etc. But why anyone would want to play any game against a computer baffles me.

AFAIK the world outside is a lot safer than it was when I was a kid. Most of the wartime munitions have been disarmed, the rivers are clean, and the bombed buildings have been repaired or grassed over. All that's missing is the children.

I had an interesting insight into modern society a few years ago. I was sent to commission a bone scanner in an army camp. I assumed this was married quarters or a retirement home, but it turned out to be a basic training unit. The medical officer explained that as kids no longer drink milk or play football at school, many 16 year olds do not have enough calcium in their bones to march across the parade ground in boots without breaking their tibiae. "Which makes jumping out of aeroplanes in full battle kit rather an impossible dream for the average teenager" he said.

Then there was the research the shows they take a whole minute longer to run a mile than children did 30 years ago. A lot of it is down to fear of paedophiles - when I was a child, no one had heard of such things, although a lot of stuff must have been going on out of sight - I would imagine the most simple children got targeted by them as they could be controlled more easily, but now there are so few children on the loose that any child on the loose is in significant danger of being targeted, so the fears are justified.

Having said that though, with modern technology it should be easy to protect children just by providing them with devices which can call in help as soon as they feel threatened. There should be a huge market for such devices, but so far no one's had the wit to make them. All you'd need is something that can be set off by hitting it (or pressing a button whenever a suspicious adult approaches), and then a message can be sent to call in help from anyone with a mobile phone nearby if it isn't cancelled soon after. Two presses would call in help immediately, and set off a loud alarm. Each child would have two of these and no attacker would know where both of them are, so any attack would be practically guaranteed to end in failure. There would be a fake way of cancelling them and a real way, the fake way silencing the alarm but not stoping the alert going out (or cancelling it after it's gone out) - any phone directly at the scene would have the alert cancelled as it may be the attacker's phone, but others nearby which were not at the exact location at the time when the alert went out would get a new message telling them that a fake cancellation has been carried out so that they know the situation is even more urgent. GPS capable phones would lead them straight to the scene.

Once that's fixed, the next thing that needs doing is to provide proper places to play, and that means access to wild land instead of concrete dog toilets.

The Naked Scientists® and Naked Science® are registered trademarks.
Information presented on this website is the opinion of the individual contributors
and does not reflect the general views of the administrators, editors, moderators,
sponsors, Cambridge University or the public at large.